Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. Photo/Wikimedia.

Human Rights Watch is charging that, despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy, the reality is that it left behind a “budding police state” —  cracking down harshly during 2011 on freedom of expression and assembly by intimidating, beating, and detaining activists, demonstrators, and journalists.

The organization’s Middle East and North Africa director, Sarah Leah Whitson, warns that “Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism as its security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists, and torture detainees.”

Its World Report 2012 attributes the downward trajectory to the security services of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki” and armed gangs.

The report notes that in February, HRW “uncovered a secret detention facility controlled by elite security forces who report to the military office of the Prime Minister. The report added, “The same elite divisions controlled Camp Honor, a separate facility in Baghdad where detainees were tortured with impunity.”

The 676-page report report says, “Given the violent forces resisting the “Arab Spring,” the international community has an important role to play in assisting the birth of rights-respecting democracies in the region.”

The report documents a wide range of human rights abuses. For example, it says, “In the weeks before the last convoy of US troops left Iraq on December 18, Iraqi security forces rounded up hundreds of Iraqis accused of being former Baath Party members, most of whom remain in detention without charge.”

The pullout of U.S. troops has been marked by an “apolitical crisis and a series of terrorist attacks targeting civilians that have rocked the country.” But Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is not new and is unconnected to the US exit. A number of US Embassy cables released by Wikileaks refer to the torture of prisoners in Iraqi custody and of knowledge of some of it by US troops.

The annual report, which covers the state of human rights in some 90 countries, says that, during nationwide demonstrations in Iraq to “protest widespread corruption and demand greater civil and political rights,” security forces “violently dispersed protesters, killing at least 12 on February 25, and injuring more than 100. Baghdad security forces beat unarmed journalists and protesters that day, smashing cameras and confiscating memory cards.”

Earlier in the year, “in one of the worst incidents, government-backed thugs armed with wooden planks, knives, and iron pipes, beat and stabbed peaceful protesters and sexually molested female demonstrators as security forces stood by and watched, sometimes laughing at the victims,” the report charges.

In May, the report says, the Council of Ministers approved a Law on the Freedom of Expression of Opinion, Assembly, and Peaceful Demonstration, which “authorizes officials to restrict freedom of assembly to protect ‘the public interest’ and in the interest of ‘general order or public morals.’ This law still awaits parliamentary approval.

HRW comments that freedom of expression fared little better as “security forces routinely abused journalists covering demonstrations, using threats, arbitrary arrests, beatings, and harassment, and confiscating or destroying their equipment.”

On September 8, the report says, “An unknown assailant shot to death Hadi al-Mahdi, a popular radio journalist often critical of government corruption and social inequality, at his home in Baghdad. Immediately before his death, HRW says al-Mahdi had received several phone and text message threats not to return to Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, which was the focal point for the weekly demonstrations.”

Earlier, after attending the February 25 “Day of Anger” mass demonstration, security forces arrested, blindfolded, and severely beat him and three other journalists during a subsequent interrogation,” HRW says.

In January 2012, HRW says it “observed that Iraqi authorities had successfully curtailed the Tahrir Square anti-government demonstrations by
flooding the weekly protests with pro-government supporters and undercover security agents. Dissenting activists and independent journalists for the most part said that they no longer felt safe attending the demonstrations.”

The report continues, “Prison brutality, including torture in detention facilities, was a major problem throughout the year. In February, Human Rights Watch uncovered, within the Camp Justice military base in Baghdad, a secret detention facility controlled by elite security forces who report to al-Maliki’s military office.”

Beginning in late 2010, the report charges, Iraqi authorities transferred more than 280 detainees to the facility, which was controlled by the Army’s 56th Brigade and the Counter-Terrorism Service.

HRW added that “the same elite divisions controlled Camp Honor, a separate facility in Baghdad where detainees were tortured with impunity. More than a dozen former Camp Honor detainees told Human Rights Watch that detainees were held incommunicado and in inhumane conditions, many for months at a time. Detainees said interrogators beat them; hung them upside down for hours at a time; administered electric shocks to various body parts, including the genitals; and repeatedly put plastic bags over their heads until they passed out from asphyxiation.”

HRW also weighed in on the human rights situation in Iraqi Kurdistan. In what it called the “Silenced Spring,” HRW’s Samer Muscati recounts that  the Kurdistan Regional Government “promised a new era of freedom for Iraqi Kurds, but it seems no more respectful of Kurdish rights to free speech than the government that preceded it.”

He added, “In a time when the Middle East is erupting in demands to end repression, the Kurdish authorities are trying to stifle and intimidate critical journalism.”

In March, Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 20 journalists in Kurdistan covering the protests and found that security forces and their proxies routinely repress journalists through threats, arbitrary arrests, beatings, and harassment, and by confiscating and destroying their equipment.

And Iraqi authorities appear to be pulling no punches. Zana Ali Ghazi, 32, a reporter for the Kurdistan News Network (KNN), a satellite television channel affiliated with the Kurdish opposition party, Goran, said that while he was trying to report on a protest in the city of Saeed Sadiq on March 15, “eight armed men, some in uniform, cracked three of his ribs and beat him with wooden clubs and Kalashnikovs until he lost consciousness. ‘They told me that if I continued to cover this type of news, they would kill me’,” Ghazi told HRW.

Kurdistan authorities have repeatedly tried to silence Livin Magazine, one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s leading independent publications, and other media. The international community should end its silence and condemn these widening
attacks, Human Rights Watch said.

A Livin reporter told Human Rights Watch that when he called the Minister of Peshmerga (Kurdistan security forces), on April 24, the minister threatened Livin’s editor, Mira, with death. The reporter says the conversation is on tape but that no one from the Iraqi authorities had made any move to investigate.

In Sulaimaniya on the night of May 11, security forces detained and beat a Kurdistan News Network reporter, Bryar Namiq, breaking his hand.

In Arbil, two journalists, who HRW says are afraid to be named for fear of reprisal, charged that on May 18 eight men in civilian clothes chased after them in late April. The men appeared in two vehicles on the street just before the journalists were supposed to meet with a regional official who had asked for a meeting with some members of the media.

HRW says the journalists believe that the men were plainclothes security forces who were aware of the meeting and were trying to kidnap them.

The HRW Report says that Soran Umar, a protest organizer and freelance journalist, has been in hiding since April 19. “I have not slept at home since then,” he told Human Rights Watch on May 17. “My sin is that I am criticizing the undemocratic acts of KRG and the two ruling parties, that is all. The security forces have tried to kidnap me, and they have ordered my arrest. They even tried to kidnap my son.”

These examples appear to be a small fraction of abuses carried out by Iraqi government authorities against journalists — Reporters Without Borders has tallied 44 physical attacks against media workers and outlets and 23 arrests.

Which prompted this thought from HRW’s Sarah Leah Whitson: “Eight years after the United States removed Saddam Hussein in the name of protecting the rights of Kurds, it is standing by silently as the government it helped to install in Kurdistan abuses and represses the population. US President Obama noted in his speech on May 20 the flourishing democracy in Iraq, but the reality is that government-sponsored fear and repression continue to fester there.”

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

The Iraq war isn’t over.

For tens of thousands of soldiers returning from the battlefield, it never will be.

Some of these men and women will turn to alcohol and drugs to ease their mental injuries; some will end up homeless, unemployed and divorced. Some will commit suicide. Most will be forgotten.

That will be one of the lasting legacies of the nearly nine-year-long conflict.

Fortunately, there are journalists like Joshua Phillips who have taken great pains to preserve the memories of a handful of veterans whose lives have been ravaged by the war.

Phillips is the author of “None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture,” a harrowing book about the torture of prisoners in Iraq and the deep psychological scars it left on the members of one battalion who dispensed pain to their victims.

In this compelling and heartrending on-camera interview, Phillips, who spent more than five years researching and writing “None of Us Were Like This Before,” discusses his investigation into the 2004 death of Army Sgt. Adam Gray, and how it led him to uncover a tragic story about torture’s other victims.

Stencil graffiti of Osama bin Laden in Bucharest, Romania. (Photo: Bixentro / flickr)

This story was originally published at Truthout. It was reported by Jeffrey Kaye and Jason Leopold

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, just as he has done in years past, a top military intelligence analyst identified by the US government only as “Iron Man” will hunker down in front of his television and watch a particularly gruesome scene of the carnage left behind on that fateful day.

“Although I try to avoid it, I glimpse a film clip, a scene, of people throwing themselves from a burning tower, people who deserved better protection from their country, from me and the men I worked with, and I hear the sounds of the lobby in the [World Trade Center] on tape,” said the man, whose alter ego chosen by the government appears to be paying homage to the flawed Marvel Comics superhero. “To me, the sights and sounds, the smoke of that day are not yet history. They are a knot, a silence, a facial tick, a missing friend in Iraq. They are not history yet.”

For many Americans, the emotional reaction to President Barack Obama’s announcement last month that a Navy Seal team had killed Osama bin Laden during a raid at his compound in Pakistan was celebratory. But for others, like the mysterious Iron Man, who has spent his career lurking in the shadows, the death of the late al-Qaeda leader is a painful reminder of what could have been avoided had the government heeded numerous early warnings of an impending attack against the very targets terrorists struck on 9/11.

The intelligence failures leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are an issue the media – and lawmakers – put to bed years ago, despite the fact that new information continues to trickle out, undercutting the integrity of the official investigations into who knew what and when.

It was an exclusive story Truthout published May 23 in the wake of Bin Laden’s death, focusing on a little-known intelligence unit that was ordered to stop tracking his movements prior to 9/11, and led Iron Man to contact Truthout to share previously undisclosed documents he recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which appear to cast further doubt on the official narrative and suggests high-level military and intelligence officials withheld key evidence from Congressional lawmakers probing the attacks.

The materials Iron Man provided to Truthout stand as the most revealing information to surface in years regarding Bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s plans to attack the United States.

This is the first page of “Iron Man’s” complaint to the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General related to intelligence work he did on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Formal Complaint

Five years ago, Iron Man, who requested Truthout conceal his true identity out of concern for his family’s privacy, lodged a formal complaint with the Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General after he was accused of improperly handling classified material.

Iron Man filed a FOIA request in September 2006, seeking a declassified copy of the six-page complaint he filed with the inspector general’s office. He finally received a copy on April 8, just a few weeks prior to the raid on Bin Laden’s compound.

What he revealed in that letter, portions of which were redacted by the government because the information is classified, is the inner workings of an elite intelligence unit he headed at one point: the Asymmetric Threats Division, formed in 1999, and “charged with reporting on asymmetric threats, especially terrorism.”

The unit worked with Joint Task Force-Civil Support (JTF-CS), also set up in 1999. According to the Defense Department (DoD), JTF-CS was charged with supporting “terrorist response operations in the continental US” and providing “military assistance to civil authorities.”

The Asymmetric Threats Division is referred to as DO5, a branch of the Joint Forces Intelligence Command (JFIC), whose responsibilities included, among other things, vetting human intelligence sources on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). From 1998 to 2001, Iron Man was working as a counterterrorism/counterintelligence analyst for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), assigned to JFIC.

The JFIC is an elite intelligence unit that falls under the authority of the United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) and “had a direct and assigned purview on international terrorism against the US, to include the operations of al-Qa’ida and the 9/11 attackers.”

The JFIC was also responsible for monitoring Bin Laden and other suspected terrorists who resided in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2000 and was charged with constructing likely scenarios that could be carried out by terrorists and possible government responses.

Iron Man noted that the “motivation for this complaint is multi-faceted.” He said the “purpose” of the letter he wrote “is to formally complain” to the inspector general that “JFIC, when instructed in or before May 2002 to provide all original material it might have relevant to al-Qa’ida and the 9/11 attacks for a Congressional inquiry, intentionally misinformed the Department of Defense that it had no purview on such matters and no such material.”

“JFIC’s role” and the DoD’s “role, in the pursuit of al-Qa’ida before 9/11 and timely analysis of the targets actually struck by the 9/11 attackers have remained unknown even to senior DoD officials,” the letter says.

Moreover, there has never been a public accounting of the work conducted by DO5. But Iron Man’s letter provides deep insight into the secret military intelligence group’s highly classified activities.

Tracking Terrorists

DO5 was “a fore-runner of current all-source fusion centers,” the letter Iron Man wrote says. Individuals assigned to the unit had “a wide mix of skills” in intelligence disciplines, including human and open-source intelligence, signals intelligence and imagery and signature intelligence.

DO5 drafted “numerous original reports … identifying probable and possible movements and locations of Usama bin Ladin and Mullah Omar,” including likely identification of the house where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed allegedly planned the 9/11 attacks.

From 1999 to 2001, the intelligence unit also “conducted imagery analysis of Jalalabad and Qandahar” and other parts of Afghanistan as they were “pulled into a community-wide initiative on al-Qa’ida.”

The letter further states, “DO5 was able to ‘scoop’ [the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency],” an agency which played a crucial role in identifying the compound in Pakistan where Bin Laden had been hiding.

According to US government officials, it was one of Bin Laden’s most trusted couriers, whom intelligence operatives identified about five years ago, that led the CIA to pinpoint Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound.

But Iron Man’s 2006 letter states that DO5 worked closely with DIA and was instrumental in identifying “a likely financial courier” for al-Qaeda, and one who may have led intelligence officials directly to Bin Laden well before 9/11.

Early Intelligence Pointed to the World Trade Center, Pentagon

In 2002, following his departure to DIA, Iron Man returned to JFIC to teach two classes on asymmetric warfare, and he kept “numerous” slides related to DO5′s work on “pre-9/11 briefings.”

As Iron Man explained in his letter of complaint to DoD’s inspector general, “upon my arrival at DIA, I had these documents e-mailed from JFIC to my DIA account, so that I could use them as references for the asymmetric warfare course I was drafting for DIA, and as references for any future counter-terrorism work I might pursue at DIA.”

It appears that the allegation Iron Man mishandled classified material stems from a decision he made to email the briefing slides to his DIA account. Iron Man declined to elaborate about the circumstances of the allegations leveled against him. Still, what he reveals in his carefully worded letter in response to those charges is explosive.

“I kept the original classifications on the slides, as historical documents, although the fact that al-Qa’ida was likely to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was clearly no longer classified.” (Emphasis added.)

Iron Man further elaborated on this point by stating that high-level DoD officials held discussions about DO5′s intelligence activities between the summer of 2000 and June 2001 revolving around al-Qaeda’s interest in striking the Pentagon, the World Trade Center (WTC), and other targets.

In other words, the Bush administration was fully aware the terrorist organization had set its sights on those structures prior to 9/11 and, apparently, government officials failed to act on those warnings.

For example, Iron Man states in his letter that in the summer of 2000, DO5 briefed USJFCOM senior intelligence officials and staffers, including the deputy commander in chief, on the “WMD Threat to the U.S.”

Iron Man describes a “sensitive,” “oral briefing” that took place that summer “indicating that the World Trade Centers #1 and #2 were the most likely buildings to be attacked [by al-Qaeda], followed closely by the Pentagon. The briefer indicated that the worst case scenario would be one tower collapsed onto another.”

Furthermore, as he states in his letter, Iron Man was certain that such a scenario was part of a “red cell analysis” discussion that took place prior to the intelligence briefing and included a finding that the buildings “could be struck by a jetliner.” He wrote that there was a suggestion about alerting WTC security and engineering or architectural staff, “but the idea was not further explored because of a command climate discouraging contact with the civilian community.”

One official who attended the DO5 briefing was Vice Adm. Martin J. Meyer, the deputy commander in chief (DCINC), USJFCOM (Iron Man’s complaint does not identify Meyer by name, but notes the presence of the “DCINC” for USJFCOM). But despite the red flags raised during the briefing, Meyer reportedly told Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, the commander of the Continental United States NORAD Region (CONR), and other high-level CONR staffers two weeks before the 9/11 attacks that “their concern about Osama bin Laden as a possible threat to America was unfounded and that, to repeat, ‘If everyone would just turn off CNN, there wouldn’t be a threat from Osama bin Laden.’”

Mayer retired from the Navy in 2003 and was hired by defense contractor Lockheed Martin.

Intelligence Withheld From Congress

Even worse, according to Iron Man’s letter, the information DO5 had collected about Bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the lead up to 9/11 was withheld from Congress after the House and Senate Intelligence Committees launched an investigation into the attacks.

“When the Justice Department requested all documents relating to 9/11 from DoD in May 2002, I notified [redacted] in the DIA Congressional Affairs office that I retained these documents,” Iron Man’s letter states. “I spoke to [redacted] JFIC DI1 [an individual who works in the command administrative staff], who informed me that JFIC had already submitted a response without any documents. I was surprised and disappointed when my successor at DO5 [redacted] notified me of the full JFIC non-response. I notified [redacted] in the Congressional Affairs office, and was told to submit the documents as DIA documents, with an explanatory e-mail. I did so on 29 May 2002, presuming (probably correctly) that the documents might be overlooked, since they originated at JFIC. I forwarded copies to [redacted] (who was departing JFIC that week), (his subordinate), and [redacted] (who was also departing JFIC that week).”

A DoD spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. Spokespeople for the House and Senate Intelligence Committees also did not respond to calls for comment.

After raising his concerns, Iron Man, who from late 2000 to June 2001 was acting head of DO5, was told by his former boss that JFIC’s formal response to Congress’ inquiries was that “al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks had been outside JFIC’s purview and that JFIC consequently held no material on those issues,” which was a lie.

Iron Man’s boss said, “He insisted [to officials who responded to the Congressional inquiries] that such was not the case, but was told this was JFIC’s response.”

Iron Man wrote that “many people” working at government agencies were knowledgeable about JFIC’s “role in preparing original analysis” on al-Qaeda, including officials at the CIA, NCIS, USJFCOM, DIA and NSA, whose names were redacted in the letter he sent to DoD’s inspector general.

However, after conducting at least 300 interviews and reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, the final report issued by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in December 2002, into “Intelligence Community Activities Before And After The Terrorist Attacks Of September 11, 2001” did not cite any of DO5′s work on al-Qaeda or Bin Laden or the fact that the intelligence unit was able to identify the terrorist group’s top two targets in the US. The later 2004 9/11 Commission Report did not mention DO5 or JFIC.

Flawed DoD Investigation

Although the inspector general acted on Iron Man’s complaint and launched an investigation, the findings of the probe, outlined in a report, declassified last year, previously reported by Truthout, was highly flawed and failed to address Iron Man’s charges that intelligence was withheld from Congress.

Indeed, it appears the author of the inspector general’s report confused Congress’ investigation into the 9/11 attacks with the independent National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, otherwise known as the 9/11 Commission, created in late 2002 by legislation passed by Congress. The inspector general’s report insisted it did not find any “evidence that the Joint Forces Intelligence Command misled Congress by withholding operational information in response to the 9/11 Commission.”

But Iron Man’s complaint specifically addressed intelligence withheld from Congress’ inquiries into the 9/11 attacks, not the independent panel’s probe, thereby dismissing an allegation Iron Man had never made.

Iron Man told Truthout the inspector general’s final report “was, shall we say, very incorrect, and intentionally did not address the full scope of the [his] complaint. ”

The watchdog did not tackle another of Iron Man’s explosive claims about DO5 briefings that centered on “numerous examples and suggestions of how [Osama bin Laden] was being hunted by JFIC and could be hunted by the [intelligence community].”

One such briefing held for a “DIA senior intelligence officer on counterterrorism” was entitled “The Search (for Osama bin Laden) – A [commander in chief] Level View,” which included “a compendium of imagery of [a] suspected [Bin Laden] house dating from 23 August 1999 until 11 April 2000.”

At the briefing, intelligence officials were informed that “eleven special reports” by DO5 had been disseminated in the “Daily Intelligence Summary on [Bin Laden], Taliban leadership, Afghan military movements, UN locations, and the economic status of Afghanistan.”

Another briefing for the counterintelligence/counterterrorism chief at NCIS, and about 30 NCIS agents, “clearly stated the JFIC’s Asymmetric Threat Division monitored ‘worldwide [counterterrorism/counterintelligence] traffic’ and routinely prepared ‘analytic reports’ and ‘supplements national agencies with original intelligence on [Bin Laden] and Afghanistan.’”

Congress was kept in the dark about those discussions and was not shown the documents distributed to intelligence officials at the briefings. The inspector general never bothered to find out why. Remarkably, the watchdog stated in its report, “JFIC did not have the mission to track Usama Bin Ladin or predict imminent US targets.”

Iron Man told Truthout it was key intelligence withheld from Congress about al-Qaeda and Bin Laden’s pre-9/11 activities that also played a part in his decision to file a complaint with the inspector general.

“My concern was not only that the 9/11 commission had not been informed, but the larger Congress, in its larger oversight responsibilities, had also not been informed,” he said.

A Heavy Burden

What remains unclear is exactly what took place back in May 2006 that prompted Iron Man’s complaint to the inspector general, given that the issues he had raised centered on events that unfolded four years earlier.

The answer to that question can be found in these passages of Iron Man’s letter, particularly the last few sentences:

“I do believe that knowledge of the work done by DO5 would add to DoD’s understanding of its role in the events leading up to 9/11, and how to avoid future attacks,” Iron Man wrote. “I have been falsely accused of revealing classified information on DO5′s work, when I am certain that information is not and has not been classified since 9/11, and I do want to see myself cleared of that false accusation.

“In addition, I and the deputy of that team, [redacted], especially carried the burden of knowledge of how close DoD came to bin Ladin and perhaps being able to reduce the number of lives lost on 9/11 …”

The deputy whose name the government redacted from Iron Man’s letter, is believed to be Kirk von Ackermann, a former Air Force captain and intelligence analyst, who was working for the US Army as a contractor in Iraq and disappeared in October 2003 while traveling between Tikrit and Kirkuk. A computer, a briefcase containing $40,000, and other materials were found in von Ackerman’s vehicle after he went missing.

Because von Ackerman’s name was classified in the complaint Iron Man filed with the inspector general, he could not confirm whether von Ackerman is the individual he was referring to.

Just three months after Iron Man filed his complaint with DoD’s inspector general, in August 2006, the Army Criminal Investigative Service concluded that von Ackerman had been kidnapped and killed. His remains have never been found nor has anyone claimed responsibility for his death.

Von Ackerman’s tragic story has been previously reported by journalist-blogger Susie Dow on the web site e Pluribus Media, but has largely remained under the radar. In a May 6 article she published on her personal blog, Dow identified von Ackermann as a member of JFIC’s Asymmetric Threats Division. Iron Man’s complaint suggests he ultimately became deputy chief of DO5.

In October 2006, Dow wrote that von Ackermann was “assigned to a counterterrorism team.”

“You’ll find no mention of either Kirk von Ackermann or his team in the 9-11 Commission report…. Well before 9-11, Kirk von Ackermann predicted aircraft could be hijacked and used as weapons against the United States. He also predicted potential targets.”

Von Ackerman’s wife, Megan von Ackerman, has maintained a blog called “Missing in Iraq,” dedicated to her missing husband. In March 2006, she wrote that her husband had planned for such a catastrophic event, but his warnings were ignored:

“… When 9/11 happened everyone around us reacted as normal, civilians would – shock, horror, fear … but Kirk, isolated from the intelligence and military community of people who knew what he knew, felt what he felt, was essentially alone,” Megan von Ackerman wrote. “For a year he had spent his days imagining just this sort of scenario. He had come up with countless plans, evaluated targets, totaled up casualties and estimated political value. He had thought like a terrorist so he could stop them. Now he had to watch it made horribly real – the nightmare he had worked so hard to avoid … Kirk had tried to make the warning, he had worked endless hours to stop this very thing happening. He knew he had no guilt that he had been ignored. But he retained an enormous sense of responsibility – not only for what happened, but for dealing with the new world that 9/11 ushered in.”

Knowing exactly how close he, von Ackerman and DO5 came to capturing Bin Laden and possibly thwarting the attacks on 9/11 is a “burden” Iron Man said he “no longer wants to carry.”

“[Redacted] and I discussed this issue the last time we spoke,” Iron Man wrote in the final paragraph of his letter to the inspector general, likely referring to von Ackerman. “He remains the longest missing man in Iraq in this war, and I want, one day, to be able to explain to his children what their father foresaw.”

Pfc. Bradley Manning

Alleged WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been in US custody since last May, after he reportedly told a former hacker that he had passed thousands of classified US military documents and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, had 22 new charges filed against him on Tuesday by the US Army, including a capital offense — “aiding the enemy” — for which the government has said it will not seek the death penalty, although, as Wired explained, “under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the presiding judge ultimately decides what charges to refer to court-martial and whether to impose the death penalty.”

Manning, who is is held at the Marine Corps brig in Quantico, Virginia, is waiting to hear whether a mental health hearing requested by his attorney will be allowed to proceed. His mental health has been in question due to the perceived severity of his solitary confinement, and the undoubted pressure exerted on him by the administration, which has been humiliated by WikiLeaks’ revelations over the last nine months, including the “Collateral Damage” video, the Afghan and Iraqi war logs, and the diplomatic cables whose release dominated headlines in the closing months of 2010. I discussed the concerns about Manning’s mental health in my articles, Is Bradley Manning Being Held as Some Sort of “Enemy Combatant”?, Psychologists Protest the Torture of Bradley Manning to the Pentagon; Jeff Kaye Reports and Former Quantico Commander Objects to Treatment of Bradley Manning, the Alleged WikiLeaks Whistleblower.

As well as being charged with “aiding the enemy,” Manning has also been charged with “five counts of theft of public property or records, two counts of computer fraud, eight counts of transmitting defense information in violation of the Espionage Act, and a count of wrongfully causing intelligence to be published on the internet knowing it would be accessible to the enemy … Five additional charges are for violating Army computer security regulations.”

According to the Guardian, “Pentagon and military officials say some of the classified information released by WikiLeaks contained the names of informants and others who had cooperated with the US military in Afghanistan, endangering their lives. According to the officials, the US military attempted to contact many of those named and take them into US bases for their own protection. Military officials told NBC News that a small number of them have still have not been found, with one official quoted as saying: ‘We didn’t get them all.’”

Observers are closely watching developments in Bradley Manning’s case, because of the possible ramifications for Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who is currently in the UK, fighting attempts to extradite him to Sweden to face sex charges. Assange’s supporters fear that the proposal to extradite him to Sweden is a thinly veiled attempt to secure his onward extradition to the US, although it is still not clear that the US government has any grounds for calling for his extradition, because, unlike Manning (or whoever it was who leaked the information to WikiLeaks), Assange can argue — and has many defenders prepared to argue also — that WikiLeaks is essentially a media organization. As such, the argument goes, WikiLeaks has dealt with leaked classified material that has a compelling public interest angle by doing what media outlets have regularly done with such material — publishing it.

In addition, the fact that Assange chose, last summer, to establish collaborative relationships with mainstream media — the Guardian, Der Spiegel, the New York Times and others — who, with the cables in particular, dictated what to publish, and when, ought to strengthen this argument, although as the charges stand, the “enemy” that Bradley Manning is accused of “aiding” is clearly WikiLeaks, and, by extension, the major newspapers who worked with WikiLeaks, and, I guess, the readers of those newspapers, even if the narrow intent is to focus on informants endangered in Afghanistan.

Neither WikiLeaks nor Julian Assange are mentioned in the charge sheet against Bradley Manning, who faces a life sentence in prison if convicted on the latest charges — if, that is, he avoids the death penalty for something that, despite the hyperbole emanating from the corridors of power in the US, has primarily been a source of embarrassment and a sign that the opening up of access to classified documents after 9/11 to an estimated three million US government employees was a whistleblowing disaster waiting to happen.

Those interested in Bradley Manning’s case can visit the website of the Bradley Manning Support Network to contribute to his legal funds, or to find out more information about his case. When the news charges were announced, Jeff Paterson of the Bradley Manning Support Network (and Courage to Resist) wrote:

I’m shocked that the military opted to charge Pfc. Bradley Manning today with the capital offense of “aiding the enemy.” While the military is down playing the fact, the option to execute Bradley has been placed on the table. It’s beyond ironic that leaked US State Department cables have contributed to revolution and revolt in dictatorships across the Middle East and North Africa, yet an American may be executed, or at best face life in prison, for being the primary whistleblower. Millions of Americans, and even more internationally, clearly understand the contribution of Pfc. Manning towards not only freedom of information, but literally freedom itself. It’s hard for me to reconcile that with the US Army’s additional criminal charges against Pfc. Manning today.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Prime Minister Nouri Maliki denies that secret prisons are in operation in Iraq. Photo/Wikimedia.

Almost eight years after US-led forces invaded Iraq, the country’s transition to a functioning and sustainable democracy built on rule of law is far from accomplished.

And knowledgeable observers are divided about whether the country is a work in progress full of growing pains, a wishful thought – or a propaganda vehicle.

According to a new report from Human Rights Watch, “the rights of Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens, especially women and detainees, are violated with impunity, and those who would expose official malfeasance or abuses by armed groups do so at enormous risk.”

“Iraq’s future as a society based on respect for fundamental human rights depends in large part on whether Iraqi authorities will adequately defend those rights and establish a credible national criminal justice system embodying international standards with respect to torture, free expression, and violence against women and other vulnerable sectors of society,” the report says.

Bikya Masr, an independent Iraqi website, has reported on the latest outrage committed by Iraqis against other Iraqis. At about 2 a.m. on February 23, 2011, more than 20 armed men, some of them wearing brown military uniforms and red berets, and others wearing black military uniforms with skull-and-cross-bones insignia on their helmets, pulled up in Humvees outside the group’s office in Baghdad and broke in, a witness told Human Rights Watch.

The security forces conducted a destructive search of the office that lasted more than an hour and seized the organization’s computers, external hard drives, cameras, cell phones, CDs, documents, and several flak jackets and helmets marked “Press,” the witness said.

“This raid on the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory shows the contempt of Iraqi authorities for groups that challenge the state’s human rights record,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

A spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command confirmed to Human Rights Watch that the men were part of the Iraqi army but gave few other details.

Ziyad al-Ajili, the group’s executive director, told Human Rights Watch that the authorities “were obviously sending us a message to stop our work of supporting journalists…. This kind of governmental intimidation is precisely what we try to shed light on.” In Iraqi television interviews over the days leading up to the raid, al-Ajili voiced support for the right of Iraqis to protest peacefully and the media’s right to report on the protests.

Human Rights Watch visited the group’s office the morning after the raid and saw extensive damage, including broken furniture, destroyed equipment, kicked-in doors, and ripped-up posters and literature for the organization’s events, such as their annual “Press Courage Awards.” Framed photographs of journalists killed in Iraq since 2003 were strewn on the floor, covered in broken glass.

Human Rights Watch expressed concern that authorities would not return the computer hard drives and other electronic data storage devices seized from the group.

Al-Ajili said he fears that the authorities used the raid as a pretext to close the office, which serves as an informal gathering point for local journalists.

In late January, the group held an awards ceremony in Baghdad, honoring investigative journalists who had uncovered corruption and other wrongdoing.

Although improvements in security since 2008 have reduced the assaults against media workers, journalists and press freedom advocates remain at risk in Iraq.

In the months following the 2003 invasion, Iraq experienced a media boom as hundreds of new publications and television and radio channels sprung up across the country, and Iraqis gained access to satellite dishes and the Internet.

But media freedom was short-lived with the introduction of restrictive legislative and other barriers and an upsurge in violence that made Iraq one of the most the most dangerous countries in the world to work as a journalist.

While improvements in security since 2008 have reduced the murder rate of media workers, journalism remains a hazardous occupation. Extremists and unknown assailants continue to kill media workers and bomb their bureaus. In addition, journalists now also have to contend with emboldened Iraqi and Kurdish security forces and their respective image-conscious central and regional political leaders.

Increasingly, journalists find themselves harassed, intimidated, threatened, arrested, and physically assaulted by security forces attached to government institutions and political parties. Senior politicians are quick to sue journalists and their publications for unflattering articles. The government should amend vague legislative and regulatory content-based restrictions that curtail the right to freedom of expression, and direct security forces not to harass, abuse, and intimidate journalists.

According to Human Rights Watch, the 2003 invasion and its resulting chaos “have exacted an enormous toll on Iraq’s citizens. Over the past eight years, violence has claimed tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and millions continue to suffer from the effects of insecurity.”

Iraq has made some recent progress as it has pulled itself away from the civil strife that engulfed the country, especially in 2006 and 2007. “But terror attacks increased again in the run-up to the March 2010 parliamentary elections” and did not abate in the months that followed. Only

in November, eight months after those elections, did Iraq’s political parties finally agree to form a new coalition government ending the political crisis that has stunted progress on security and other fronts, including human rights.

The Human Rights Watch report is based on on-the-ground research conducted in April 2010, visiting seven cities across Iraq and interviewing 178 activists, lawyers, journalists, religious leaders, detainees (former and current), security officers, victims of violence, and ordinary Iraqis.

“We found that, beyond the continuing violence and crimes associated with it, human rights abuses are commonplace. This report presents those findings regarding violations of the rights of women and other vulnerable populations, the right to freedom of expression, and the right to be free from torture and ill-treatment in the 2009-2010 period,” HRW said.

The Rights of Women and Girls have also been adversely affected by the deterioration of security, which has promoted a rise in tribal customs and religiously-inflected political extremism. “This has had a deleterious effect on women’s rights, both inside and outside the home. For Iraqi women, who enjoyed some of the highest levels of rights protection and social participation in the region before 1991, these have been heavy blows,” HRW said.

It added: “Militias promoting misogynist ideologies have targeted women and girls for assassination, and intimidated them to stay out of public life. Increasingly, women and girls are victimized in their own homes, sometimes killed by their fathers, brothers and husbands for a wide variety of perceived transgressions that allegedly shame the family or tribe. If they seek official protection from violence in the home, women risk harassment and abuse from Iraq’s virtually all-male police and other security forces.”

HRW notes that “Iraqi law protects perpetrators of violence against women: Iraq’s penal code considers ‘honorable motives’ to be a mitigating factor in crimes including murder. The code also gives husbands a legal right to discipline their wives. Trafficking in women and girls in and out of the country for sexual exploitation is widespread. There have been no reported convictions for trafficking, and a long-awaited anti-trafficking bill is on hold in the parliament, awaiting revisions.”

Outside of Kurdistan, there are no government-run shelters. The many women who have fled sectarian or other violence, who have been widowed, or who for other reasons are heads of households and dependent on state aid are particularly vulnerable to abuse.

The organization claims religious and government institutions are “sometimes complicit in their exploitation – in exchange for charity or benefits, widows have been asked to engage in “pleasure marriages,” a previously banned traditional practice that critics say is akin to prostitution.”

The women who are coerced into the practice face stigmatization and have no recourse. Human Rights Watch calls on Iraq to immediately suspend and proceed to repeal sections in the penal code that allow mitigation of sentences on grounds of “honor” for violent crimes against women.

Women are but one of the groups being marginalized by the Iraqis. The country today has numerous communities whose marginalization has left them in dire straits.

Although the government has passed laws (including constitutional safeguards) to protect some of these different communities, and in some cases has instituted significant assistance programs, it is still failing some of its most vulnerable citizens, such as internally displaced persons, minorities and persons with disabilities. Many of the government’s assistance or protection programs are non-operational or sub-operational, and insufficient to meet the needs of target populations, despite Iraq’s international and domestic commitments. More than 1.5 million Iraqis fled their neighborhoods as sectarian violence tore up their communities in 2006 and 2007.

Thousands of internally displaced persons now reside in squatter settlements without access to basic necessities such as clean water, electricity and sanitation. An over-stretched Ministry of Displacement has promised aid, but none of the more than a dozen displaced persons we interviewed had received any.

Human Rights Watch calls on Iraq’s government to develop a coherent national strategy on refugees and internally displaced persons to facilitate their voluntary return, local integration in places of displacement, or relocation to other places in safety and dignity.

Armed groups proclaiming intolerant ideologies have continued their assaults on minority communities, decimating Iraq’s indigenous populations, and forcing thousands to flee abroad with no plans to return. The government has failed to stop such attacks targeting minority groups, including Sabian andaeans, Chaldo-Assyrians, Yazidis, and Shabaks. To end a climate of impunity, the government must conduct thorough and impartial investigations when attacks occur and bring those responsible to justice.

Years of armed conflict have resulted in thousands of war amputees and other persons with disabilities. Stigmatized, unable to find work, get adequate medical care, or obtain new prostheses and wheelchairs, persons with disabilities in Iraq find themselves relegated to the margins of society. The government needs to ensure access to education and employment, strengthen health-care services, and establish rehabilitation and psychosocial support facilities.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraqis hoped that torture as an instrument of state coercion would end. But US and British forces tortured Iraqi detainees at their facilities across Iraq, most famously at Abu Ghraib. And despite knowing there was a clear risk of torture, US authorities transferred thousands of Iraqi detainees to Iraqi custody, where Iraqi security forces have continued the torture tradition.

Iraqi interrogators routinely abuse detainees, regardless of sect, usually in order to coerce confessions. Interviews with dozens of detainees transferred from a secret detention facility outside Baghdad revealed the significant shortcomings of Iraq’s criminal justice system. Interrogators sodomized and whipped detainees, burned them with cigarettes and pulled out their fingernails and teeth.

Yet Iraq’s prime minister, instead of ordering a public inquiry and prosecuting those responsible for the abuse, dismissed both our findings and those of the Ministry of Human Rights as fictitious, and suspended the government’s prison inspection team that initially uncovered the abuse. The government should launch independent and impartial investigations into all allegations of torture and ill-treatment, and institute disciplinary measures and criminal prosecution proceedings, as appropriate, against officials at all levels who are responsible for the abuse of detainees.

The United States and other governments should assist with legal reforms in Iraq by advising how to amend existing laws so that they are consistent with Iraq’s obligations under international human rights standards. The international community should press Iraq to promptly investigate all allegations of torture and ill-treatment and criminally prosecute officials who are responsible for the abuse of detainees.

INTER PRESS News Service has reported that “the publication of a motherlode of secret field reports from the Iraq War is shining a bright light on heretofore unknown or underreported suspicions about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by their fellow Iraqis, often with their U.S. military counterparts “turning a blind eye.”

The Wikileaks documents offer graphic proof that U.S. servicemen and women often witnessed or were aware of Iraqi brutality against prisoners, but turned a blind eye.

While the Wikileaks documents are sparse on information about mistreatment of prisoners in U.S.-run detention facilities, they are heavy on the chilling details of abuse of Iraqis by Iraq’s own army and police.

During the period covered by the Wikileaks documents, at least six prisoners died in Iraqi custody, most of them in recent years. Hundreds of reports referenced beatings, burnings and lashings. Such treatment appeared to be considered normal by the Iraqis.

According to The New York Times, “In one case, Americans suspected Iraqi Army officers of cutting off a detainee’s fingers and burning him with acid. Two other cases produced accounts of the executions of bound detainees. And while some abuse cases were investigated by the Americans, most noted in the archive seemed to have been ignored, with the equivalent of an institutional shrug: soldiers told their officers and asked the Iraqis to investigate.”

U.S. military orders said that if U.S. personnel were not directly involved in prisoner abuse, U.S. soldiers need not take any action. This order caused U.S. forces to look the other way in cases of the abuse of Iraqis by Iraqis.

When U.S. forces discovered and reported abuse, Iraqis frequently failed to act. One report said a police chief refused to file charges “as long as the abuse produced no marks.” Another police chief told military inspectors that his officers engaged in abuse “and supported it as a method of conducting investigations.”

The Wikileaks documents also show that U.S. forces sometimes used the threat of Iraqi brutality to persuade prisoners to cooperate with interrogators.

It was not until later in the war that some of the worst examples of Iraqi abuse came to light. For example, in August 2009, an Iraqi police commando unit reported that a detainee committed suicide in its custody, but an autopsy conducted in the presence of a U.S. official “found bruises and burns on the detainee’s body as well as visible injuries to the head, arm, torso, legs, and neck.” The report stated that the police “have reportedly begun an investigation.”

And in December, 12 Iraqi soldiers, including an intelligence officer, were caught on video in Tal Afar shooting to death a prisoner whose hands were tied, The Times reports.

Wikileaks reports that, while the U.S. forces told the local Iraqi Army commander, no inquiry was begun because U.S. soldiers were not involved.

It was not unusual, however, for U.S. soldiers to intervene. One U.S. soldier heard screams in a prison cell and found two badly dehydrated detainees with bruises on their bodies. He ordered them out of Iraqi custody.

In August 2006, Wikileaks documents show, a U.S. sergeant in Ramadi walked into an Iraqi military police station and found an Iraqi lieutenant using an electrical cable to slash the bottom of a detainee’s feet. The sergeant stopped him, but later he found the same Iraqi officer whipping a detainee’s back.

The Wikileaks disclosures, while reporting little that was unknown, paint a far more detailed picture of the military sea-change that defined the United States’ involvement in Iraq. The New York Times says, “The early days of the Iraq war, with all its Wild West chaos, ushered in the era of the private contractor, wearing no uniform but fighting and dying in battle, gathering and disseminating intelligence and killing presumed insurgents.”

WikiLeaks is an international organization that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of otherwise unavailable documents while preserving the anonymity of sources. Its website was launched in 2006.

Meanwile, Marian Wang of ProPublica, wrote that “Iraqi protesters clashed with Iraqi riot police on Feb. 25, 2011, in Baghdad’s Tahrir square following a rally calling for improved public services, more jobs and less corruption.”

She continued: “As the Mideast protests and government crackdowns continue, one country to watch closely is Iraq, with whom the U.S. has a long-term partnership and where clashes between protesters and government forces recently turned violent. Even as Iraqi security forces detained and abused hundreds of intellectuals and journalists, the U.S. government—in keeping with a pattern of silence on Iraq’s abuses—has withheld criticism of its strategic ally. (Salon noticed this too).

“Asked generally about the violence against Iraqi demonstrators on Friday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said only “the approach we’ve taken with regard to Iraq is the same that we’ve taken with regard to the region,” which he said was to call on governments to respond to the protests peacefully. Neither the White House nor the State Department seem to have mentioned the matter since. Yesterday’s State Department briefing discussed Libya, Egypt, Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China, Pakistan, Argentina, South Africa and Haiti—Iraq was never discussed.

ProPubica wrote that “nearly 30 people have been killed in the Iraqi unrest so far. Unlike in other Mideast countries, the Iraqis are demanding better services and an end to corruption, not an end to the government.

Four journalists who had been released described being rounded up well after they had left a protest of thousands at Baghdad’s Tahrir Square. They said they were handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten and threatened with execution by soldiers from an army intelligence unit.

One journalist told the Washington Post that Iraqi soldiers used electric shocks on him.

It’s far from the first time the government of Iraq has been accused of detaining and abusing citizens, including journalists. Allegations of abuse by the post-Saddam Iraqi government have been made year after year , even at times by the U.S. government, which has also had to come to terms with its own detainee torture and abuse in American-run prisons in Iraq.

Last year, the Los Angeles Times uncovered a secret Baghdad prison where hundreds of Sunni men were detained and tortured by Iraqi security forces. “They beat people, they used electricity,” one Iraqi official told the Times. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki vowed to shut the prison, saying: “Our reforms continue, and we have the Human Rights Ministry to monitor this. We will hold accountable anybody who was proven involved in such acts.”

Asked about the detention and torture by Iraqi forces in July 2010, a senior administration official said in a background briefing that the U.S. is “engaged with the Iraqis” on these kind of issues “on a regular basis.” The administration official noted that what was “particularly striking” was that the Iraqi government took corrective action and “Iraqis are finding a way to use the political system.”

Months later, Amnesty International released another report detailing continued widespread abuse and torture in Iraqi prisons. And earlier this month, Human Rights Watch released a report that described yet another secret prison run by Maliki that was still operating. (Iraqi government officials denied the report.) Two Iraqi journalists told NPR their stories—one said he had been imprisoned at a secret facility for nine months; the other said his nephew was detained by Maliki’s personal combat brigade, which reportedly controls the secret prison.

Asked earlier this month about the latest prison allegations, a U.S. military spokesman made clear that U.S. troops were not involved and referred further questions to Maliki’s government, the Post reported

Finally, the Washngton Post reported on Sunday that Iraqi security forces detained about 300 people, including prominent journalists, artists and lawyers who took part in nationwide demonstrations Friday, in what some of them described as an operation to intimidate Baghdad intellectuals who hold sway over popular opinion.

On Saturday, the Post wrote, four journalists who had been released described being rounded up well after they had left a protest of thousands at Baghdad’s Tahrir Square. They said they were handcuffed, blindfolded, beaten and threatened with execution by soldiers from an army intelligence unit.

“It was like they were dealing with a bunch of al-Qaeda operatives, not a group of journalists,” said Hussan al-Ssairi, a journalist and poet who described seeing hundreds of protesters in black hoods at the detention facility.

“Yesterday was like a test, like a picture of the new democracy in Iraq.”

The Iraq protests were different from many of the revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa in that demonstrators were calling for reform, not for getting rid of the government. Their demands ranged from more electricity and jobs to ending corruption, reflecting a dissatisfaction with government that cuts across sectarian and class lines, the Post wrote.

William Fisher, a regular contributor to The Public Record, has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He reports on a wide-range of issues for numerous domestic and international newspapers and online journals. He blogs at The World According to Bill Fisher.

A number of media outlets, which are entrusted to explain to the public the implications of the leaked raw data, seem to go out of their way to make the best of a bad situation (for Pentagon officials) and derail the essence of the message that comes out from these classified documents.

They are desperate to downplay the scandalous actions perpetrated by the American forces with the green lights that go high up the chain of command, and try to divert the focus on the Iraqi side alone despite the following:

1. The US military acts were no less horrific.
2. American policies and actions forced Iraq into borderline civil war – and critics say deliberately (divide and rule). But regardless of the intent, the US government was under legal obligation under international law to ensure the safety of Iraqi civilians.
3. It is easier to report more of what the Iraqis were doing and less of what you are carrying out, when such actions are embarrassing or are clearly war crimes.
4. The Americans were monitoring the Iraqis, but who was monitoring the Americans?
5. The new Iraqi recruits were trained by the Americans, who are themselves sometimes confused by what should be the correct code of conduct.
6. When not conducting torture themselves, the Americans were either handing Iraqi detainees to their Iraqi torturers or were present at the scene of the crime and did nothing. But what must not be missed is (a) why did they not act? And (b) who were the detainees? (We know that the torturers are pro-American).

It is most probable that those tortured detainees were not arrested for say shoplifting or failing to pay their parking tickets. They are most likely to be ‘suspected’ or actual anti-occupation insurgents, or even just loud critics of post-invasion Iraq. They could include anything from innocent bystanders, to Al-Qaeda extremists, passing through nationalists, Bathists, Sadirists or just some apolitical guy (or girl) who simply objects to foreign military occupation.

If they were perceived to be actively anti-occupation (whether Sunni or Shiite) then they will be treated as enemies by American and Iraqi forces alike. In this new US-Iraqi alliance, who does the capturing and who gets to carry out the torturing is really a matter of convenience.

Also, what later became a sectarian conflict did not begin that way. It started as a clash between armed anti-occupation groups and US-led forces. Then following the establishment of the new Iraqi forces, the insurgents began finding themselves fighting US-armed (trained and paid) Iraqis who got in the way in their pursuit of American soldiers. Matters were complicated later with a number of other factors (all resulting from the invasion and post-2003 US policies) and the conflict became between various communities (not just along the Sunni-Shiite divide).

For better understanding of the sectarian conflict in Iraq, you could take a look at the roots of the Rwandan genocide. And if you look at how the sectarian conflict was contained in Northern Ireland, it makes you wonder why the exact opposite polices were applied by the occupying coalition in Iraq – a place that prior 2003 did not even have the problems of Northern Ireland.

Critics of Assange, whether US officials or in the media, have overnight developed caring left-wing hearts and began talking about Wikileaks potentially ‘endangering lives’. These are predominately none other than the well-established war advocates and possible war crimes perpetrators of this world.

The website that told the world that there were at least 15,000 dead Iraqis that no knew about wants to put an end to further bloodshed by informing the US electorate of what is – secretly – being committed in its name (which is really no news to the Iraqis). But Assange went one step further and asked the Pentagon to coordinate with Wikileaks in redacting any sensitive information. The Pentagon declined.

One must always remember that these war logs were already self-censored when originally recorded. Their authors also knew that they could be made public and may be accessed by others. So what is recorded there is the ‘official’ version of certain events. This version may not always correspond to (the much darker) reality, nor does it necessarily record all that took place or was carried out by US soldiers in Iraq.

Secondly, these logs are limited to what took place in the presence of the US military and what it saw as significant to put down. This means that what US intelligence services or private security contractors do on the ground would not show up there unless there was an involvement of the military. And even then the motives of these parties could not be verified.

It’s safe to say that – for example – any covert CIA operation or unacknowledged Balckwater conduct would fly right above the head of the US military, who might well mistake the consequences of such actions to be the work of some ‘hostile’ parties, and not that of their supposed allies.

These documents serve as ‘confessions’ of the actions carried by the US military, and they serve as witness accounts to conducts performed by their allied Iraqi (and non-Iraqi) forces. But beyond that they could include anything between speculations and bold lies. Anything related to US foes inside Iraq or in neighbouring countries is nothing more than the view held (or projected) by the American military – not some damning evidence against anyone except the military itself and its allies in Iraq.

Mamoon Alabbasi is an Iraqi journalist based in London. He can be contacted at abbasid@writeme.com.

Washington was warned by the United Nations and many human rights organisations that torture was widespread in Iraqi detention centres. But the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal the US’s own troops informed their commanders of more than 1,300 claims of torture by Iraqi Security forces between 2005 and 2009.

Prisoner handover

In July 2010, the US completed the handover of 9,250 detainees to the Iraqi authorities.

Related article: War logs challenge US prison inspection all-clear

It would be a clear violation of international law, drawn up by the United Nations Convention Against Torture, ratified by the US in 1994, for any government to transfer detainees to a regime at whose hands they face torture or other serious human rights violations.

However, the 1,365 cases of alleged torture by the Iraqi authorities found by the Bureau, raise questions as to why the US government handed over detainees to these authorities.

Human rights organisations have expressed outrage at the revelations. Professor Novak, the UN Rapporteur on Torture told the Bureau: “If the United States forces handed over detainees to Iraqi jurisdiction, despite the fact that they were at serious risk of being subjected to torture, that is a violation of Article 3C of the Convention Against Torture of which the US is a signatory.”

He said there should be a full and thorough investigation to ascertain whether any of the detainees handed over to the Iraqi authorities by the US have been abused.

“The burden of proof is on the US to prove that they can categorically state that the detainees they are handing over are not at risk of torture.There should be an investigation to look into the fate of those individuals to see whether they have been abused.”

President Obama meets US troops in Iraq by the US Army/Flickr

Graphic: detentions in Iraq

It is likely that the detainees handed over could face torture. Many of the reports in the logs detail complaints of brutality reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s regime. They include accounts of detainees being whipped with cables, chains, wire and pistols and being burnt with acid and cigarettes. Some accounts describe people having electric shocks to their genitals, fingernails ripped out and fingers cut off. In other cases, the documents report men being sodomised with bottles, hoses and raped.

One of the worst cases relates to a man held in an underground bunker and tortured for two months in Diyala Prison, run by the Iraqi Ministry of Justice.

March 25 2006

His hands were bound/shackled and he was suspended from the ceiling; the use of blunt objects (pipes) to beat him on the back and legs; and the use of electric drills to bore holes in his legs.

Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Porgramme said: “This adds further weight, if it were needed, that US authorities committed a serious breach of international law when they handed over thousands of detainees to Iraqi security forces who, they clearly knew, were responsible for widespread and systematic torture. It is our view that the current US administration is complicit in torture.

“The US authorities, like all other governments, have an obligation not only to ensure that their own forces do not use torture, but also that people who were detained ans are bieng held by US forces are not handed over to other authorities who are likely to torture them.”

He continued: “The US failed to respect this obligation in Iraq, despite the great volume of evidence available from many different quarters showing that the Iraqi security forces use torture widely and are allowed to do so with impunity.

Graphic: detainee abuse in Iraq

The US military records add to a body of evidence gathered by the international community concerning allegations of torture within Iraqi state facilities.

Evidence of abuse

In 2008 the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) warned, “Ongoing widespread ill-treatment and torture of detainees by Iraqi law enforcement authorities, amidst pervasive impunity of current and past human rights abuses, constitute severe breaches of international human rights obligations.”

Related article: Allegations of prisoner abuse by US troops after Abu Ghraib

Despite this, on January 1 2009, the Iraq-United States Bilateral Security Agreement came into force. This provided for the release and transfer from US jurisdiction of detainees to Iraqi custody. At the time, the UNAMI called on both parties “to implement the agreement in strict compliance with human rights norms and standards”.

US forces continued to gather evidence of alleged detainee abuse throughout this period, logging 112 cases in 2009. The last detainee case reported in the military files is dated December 23. It describes an incident in a video recording that showed 12 Iraqi Army officers executing a detainee. This, even when the handover was occurring.

December 23 2009

The detainee had his hands bound … The footage shows the soldiers moving the detainee into the street, pushing him to the ground, punching him, and shooting him.

Related article: Torture widespread in Iraqi detention facilities

The bulk of the torture allegations are against facilities run by either the Iraqi Ministry of Interior or the Ministry of Defence – establishments such as police stations and army buildings. But there are allegations also  against the MOJ recorded in the SIGACTS.

Republished under a Creative Commons license. Visit IraqWarLogs.com for complete coverage by the staff of Bureau for Investigative Journalism on the WikiLeaks Iraq war documents.

Bob Woodward’s new book, Obama’s Wars, is full of the same insider tales of government gossip as his previous books. One reads Woodward to pick out the various gems strewn along the way, cognizant that even those are the products of spin manufactured by the various principals involved. A particularly interesting nugget concerns the way the intelligence agencies passed on information about their torture program to the incoming Obama administration.

Woodward spends precious few pages on this subject, and the anecdotes involved can’t be relied upon to provide a real study of just what went on. But the couple of stories provided are juicy enough.

According to Woodward, on December 9, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama was shepherded into a tiny SCIF office to meet with CIA Director Michael Hayden and Director of National Intelligence Michael O’Connell. “Hayden sat directly across from Obama at a table so narrow that they were uncomfortably close to each other.” Obama had brought Joe Biden, Jim Jones, Greg Craig, and “several others.” Hayden and O’Connell reviewed various top secret clandestine and anti-terrorism programs, secret operations against North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, etc. Craig was apparently “shocked” when Hayden told Obama’s group that the U.S. “owned” the political structure and security forces of Iraq.

Be that as it may, Hayden, who apparently ran the briefing, got to their review of the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program at the end of the meeting. While Obama apparently sat mostly impassively, Biden and the others were not convinced by CIA claims they got promises of “no torture” from the countries to which they sent kidnapped victims in the “war on terror.” Hayden also noted that the CIA “black sites” had been shut down and “all the prisoners transferred to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.” This timeline conflicts with the claim by Obama that he had closed the black sites himself in his early executive order on detentions.

Then the discussion wheeled around to the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT). At this point, Woodward’s narrative gets a bit confusing. Hayden tells Obama that, per a 2006 finding by President Bush, only six of the 13 original EITs remained in use. Woodward reminds us of the original 13 in an endnote. They are Dietary manipulation; Forced nudity; Attention grasp; Walling (slamming the prisoner into a wall multiple times); Facial hold; Facial or insult slap; Abdominal slap; Cramped Confinement; Wall standing (a kind of stress position); Stress positions proper; Water dousing; Sleep deprivation; and Waterboarding. (What happened to the insects in a box, Bob?) Woodward does describe the sleep deprivation in a way consistent with my contention in May 2009 that “sleep deprivation” was always combined with stress positions, shackling, partial nudity or humiliation, and dietary manipulation or partial starvation. This aspect of sleep deprivation, never totally emphasized by Woodward in the main text of the book, must be kept in mind when Woodward has Hayden tell Obama that the attenuated version of the EITs (which includes sleep deprivation) are more than enough to “break” “suspected terrorists” in “less than a week.”

Obama asked what the remaining six EITs were? And Hayden’s reported answer appears to veer off from the EITs.

Hayden said: Isolation of the detainee; noise or loud music; and lights in the cells 24 hours a day. There was limited use of shackles when moving a prisoner or when the prisoner was a danger. In addition, blindfolds were used when moving prisoners or when the prisoners might gain information that could compromise the security of the facility.

“David, stand up please,” Hayden said to David Shedd, the DNI’s deputy director for policy. Shedd rose. Hayden gently slapped his face, then shook the deputy DNI.

It was as rough as what might happen in “Little League football,” Hayden said. [pg. 54]

From reading this account, apart from the hilarious bit of play-acting with the ever-obliging David Shedd, it’s difficult to see what six of the EITs were retained, and what, besides waterboarding, was eliminated. For one thing, Hayden’s reply focuses on techniques that were not part of the EITs — isolation, sensory overload, and partial sensory deprivation — while demonstrating by a slap to O’Connell’s deputy that “Facial or insult slap” was still in use.

Hayden then makes his play to keep “these methods” under an Obama administration, because “the very existence of the interrogation program was more important than its content.” The CIA director told the President-elect, “Terrorists would know they faced a more severe interrogation if picked up by the CIA than by the military, which used the Army Field Manual.”

But how would the terrorists know this, when even I can’t figure out what exactly the U.S. intelligence agencies do? Woodward quotes Hayden in an unintentional moment of self-revelation. For the CIA, the form is more important that the content. The “terrorists” don’t really know, but they believe they know they can expect something terrible, something especially bad. The point of this is to engender fear. And fear is an essential component to psychological torture. It enhances the effects of sensory overload and sensory deprivation, and contributes to the psychological breakdown of the victim. This is not a theory, but was the conclusion of years of research by the U.S. government into interrogation and torture. The use of SERE trainees as experimental subjects for coercive interrogation and techniques did not begin in 2001 or 2002 — it began at least over 50 years ago.

In 1956, in the pages of an obscure academic journal, Sociometry, I.E. Farber, Harry F. Harlow, and psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West published a classic work on interrogation, Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread) (BCD). It was based on a report for the Study Group on Survival Training, paid for by the U.S. Air Force. (See West LJ., Medical and psychiatric considerations in survival training. In Report of the Special Study Group on Survival Training (AFR 190 16). Lackland Air Force Base, Tex: Air Force Personnel and Training Research Centers; 1956.) This research linked Air Force “Survival” training, later called SERE, with torture techniques, and as we will see, use of such techniques by the CIA, something we would see again decades later in the Mitchell-Jessen “exploitation” plan.

BCD examined the various types of stress undergone by prisoners, and narrowed them down to “three important elements: debility, dependency, and dread”.

Debility was a condition caused by “semi-starvation, fatigue, and disease”. It induced “a sense of terrible weariness”.

Dependency on the captors for some relief from their agony was something “produced by the prolonged deprivation of many of the factors, such as sleep and food… [and] was made more poignant by occasional unpredictable brief respites.” The use of prolonged isolation of the prisoner, depriving an individual of expected social intercourse and stimulation, “markedly strengthened the dependency”.

Dread probably needs no explanation, but BCD described it as “chronic fear…. Fear of death, fear of pain, fear of nonrepatriation, fear of deformity of permanent disability…. even fear of one’s own inability to satisfy the demands of insatiable interrogators.”

…. This form of carrot and stick torture may not seem that sophisticated, but it is the use of basic nervous system functioning and human instinctual need that makes it “scientific”. The need for sensory stimulation and social interaction, the need to eat, to sleep, to reduce fear, all of these are used to build dependencies upon the captor, using the fact that “the strengthening effects of rewards — in this instance the alleviation of an intensely unpleasant emotional state — are fundamentally automatic” [p. 278]. This impairment of higher cognitive states and disruption and disorganization of the prisoner’s self-concept, producing something like “a pathological organic state”, was subsequently modified and used by the CIA in its interrogations of countless individuals. If more brutal forms of torture sometimes were used, especially by over-eager foreign agents or governments, DDD remained the gold standard, the programmatic core of counterintelligence interrogation at the heart of the CIA’s own intelligence manuals.

Now Bob Woodward is not going to explain all that. Being a stenographer for spooks and politicians, he offers very little analysis at all. His fable of how Obama got briefed on the use of torture by the CIA, and Obama’s subsequent decision to ban all the EITs and utilize the Army Field Manual may bear some elements of truth. It seems certain Obama knows very little if any of the historical material I adverted to above. And Barack Obama, like much of America, may not know that the Army Field Manual contains the very techniques that Hayden said the CIA was using (isolation, sensory overload, sleep deprivation, driving up of fear). The operative word here is ignorance: ignorance about what has gone on and is going on.

This nation has not gotten the full truth about this country’s torture program, past, present, and plans for the future. As the commentators latch onto the upcoming election with ever-greater avidity, it appears certain that these issues will get shoved even farther onto the back burner. We can’t let that happen. The City of Berkeley has announced that October 10-16 will be “Say No to Torture Week.” I’ll be participating with a slew of other celebrities, bloggers, psychologists, and political activists to make it clear that “the community finds it unacceptable for an American torture apparatus to remain operational while those responsible remain unaccountable.” What is your community doing?

Originally published on Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.